Talk:Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies and Theory Journals/@comment-173.53.115.44-20170413004500
i have to say that this page, which i just discoverd, is really disturbing. It's like Yelp or Amazon reviews, written totally from the self-seeking perspective of authors and with virtually no awareness of the world these journals are a part of, their reasons for being, the reasons there are standards and procedures, and much more. Reading these comments you'd think that journals must either take everything sent to them or respond with detailed helpful comments to every essay. Neither is true. Journals are typically run by teams of academics with multiple roles. The mere fact that someone has set up a journal does not obligate them to provide quick helpful comments on hundreds of essays just because people feel they deserve them. it does not obligate them to publish quickly, or any of the other things the people commenting here seem to assume. The journals exist for their readers and to represent the work chosen by their editors, first and foremost. The editors have a responsbility to publish what they see as meeting whatever standard and point of view they mean their journal to have; otherwise we would have nothing but giant baskets of "the best" according to whatever criteria might exist. That's not even a pleasant way to imagine the world working. I want Critical Inquiry to have a different "voice" from October from SubStance from Telos. They have not a jot of responsibilty to me or anyone else except themselves to publish what they think fits their style. I say this as someone who has been rejected many times from several of these journals and never published in them. Yes, it stung at first, but I never had the sense that they owed me something that is so evident throughout many of these comments. It's like the commentators here forget what it is like to read these journals once they try to contribute. I want every issue of Critical Inquiry to feel like an issue of Critical Inquiry, and I suspect most people know what that means (note: that is one of the journals from which I've been rejected many times and which has never published me). I want them to publish from the stable of usual Critical Inquiry authors and only occasionally from newcomers. that is its voice. it would no longer be what it is if it did something else. They don't owe you anything. Do you realize that when you rank the amount of time it takes to turn around your essay, you are implicitly giving orders to very senior people in the field, who have many, many, many such "orders" all demanding their attention? Would you like the Chair of English at Chicago (often on the CI board) to refrain from writing a third-year review or tenure review of someone else in order to take the time to review your article right this very minute because you want him/her to? Because that's how most of these posts sound: me, me, me, me, me, I'm very important and nobody else matters but me.